Designing Creative Systems in Organizations
An organization requires a system to organize the generation and exploitation of new ideas. There is no single blueprint. Organizations must develop what is most appropriate for their own specific circumstances. Here are some guidelines:
- Make the system as comprehensive and as inclusive as possible.
- Ensure the system is professionally managed by your best people.
- Incorporate basic training in creative methods, tools and techniques.
- Make process facilitation skills available, outsourced or in-house or both.
- Build in time and incentives for people to generate new ideas.
- Set up appropriate forums to evaluate and implement ideas.
- Figure out ways to support and reward people for their results and effort.
- Design the most suitable system for your organization, which may be:
- Creative Challenge Champions- offering facilitation for specific problems
- Staff Suggestion Schemes- to make the best of all people’s ideas
- Creativity labs- in which ad-hoc teams work creatively on all issues
- Skunkworks- special teams, set apart and authorized to break all the rules
- Creative Cafés- spaces dedicated to creative thinking and action
- Creative Moments- weekly time dedicated to creative thinking and action
- “Out of the Box” Clubs- forums dedicated to creative thinking and action
- Creativity blogs or wikis- based on the inter(or intra)net
- Any other system that you may imagine and implement
- Whichever system you choose, implement it with rigor, not rigidity (we have known of staff suggestion boxes which are just boxes).
- Remember to continuously promote, nourish and re-launch your system.
- Ensure the wholehearted involvement of management at all levels.
- How about a Director of Creativity and Change empowered to promote creative thinking and action to achieve organizational targets?
- Seriously consider opening your system beyond your own employees and outside your company.
In all cases the CEO must own the system and develop the right kind of culture for the system to flourish.